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FILMSTUD 178:Film and History of Latin American Revolutions and Counterrevolutions (HISTORY 78, HISTORY 178, ILAC 178)

Note: Students who have completed
HISTORY 78N or 78Q should not enroll in this course. In this course we will watch and critique films made about Latin America's 20th century revolutions focusing on the Cuban, Chilean and Mexican revolutions. We will analyze the films as both social and political commentaries and as aesthetic and cultural works, alongside archivally-based histories of these revolutions.

FILMSTUD 211N:Childish Enthusiasms and Perishable Manias

This course has a simple premise: Effective scholarship need not suck the joy from the world. College is serious stuff. Serious questions need to be asked in serious fields; serious meanings need to be derived from serious texts. College and graduate school are sites of gravitas; weighty work is expected. But what of levitas -- a lighter, more playful category? Does such a concept have a place at such institutions of higher learning as Stanford? Gravitas and levitas can co-exist; one need not preclude the other. Writers and artists have long sought to incorporate a playful spirit, recognizing virtue in levity. Encountering Times Square in 1922, the British writer G. K. Chesterton reflected, ¿If a child saw these colored lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child.¿ What does it mean to do scholarship that respects a child¿s engagement with the world?
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This course has a simple premise: Effective scholarship need not suck the joy from the world. College is serious stuff. Serious questions need to be asked in serious fields; serious meanings need to be derived from serious texts. College and graduate school are sites of gravitas; weighty work is expected. But what of levitas -- a lighter, more playful category? Does such a concept have a place at such institutions of higher learning as Stanford? Gravitas and levitas can co-exist; one need not preclude the other. Writers and artists have long sought to incorporate a playful spirit, recognizing virtue in levity. Encountering Times Square in 1922, the British writer G. K. Chesterton reflected, ¿If a child saw these colored lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child.¿ What does it mean to do scholarship that respects a child¿s engagement with the world? To retain (or recover) the pleasurable relation to particular objects or habits that we were allowed when younger? Does intellectually credible work depend upon ¿critical distance¿ between the scholar and the object of study? Can we take something seriously without imposing a seriousness that it may not possess (or want)? Do you have to be serious to be serious? This seminar will try to answer some of those questions. We will explore such ¿unserious¿ media as amusement parks, comics, cartoons, musicals, and children¿s books, and encounter modes of critical engagement that stress experience over meaning, and investment over critical distance.

Last offered: Autumn 2018
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

FILMSTUD 213:Theories of Melodrama (FILMSTUD 413)

Commonly derided for being over the top, with films in this mode put down as weepies, tear-jerkers, and women's films, melodrama as a genre and a cinematic mode has been reclaimed by feminist-queer-film scholars as providing a powerful site of ideological struggle and sustained engagement with individual and social subjection and suffering. Melodrama, a transgeneric mode of emotional dramaturgy, centered around body and community, delay and chance, realism and excess, affords radical critiques of discourses of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. We will consider melodrama's careful calibration of sensation and affect through its employment of cinematic form (color, music, editing etc.), and sweeping performative gestures. Through an analysis of films from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, by auteurs such as Douglas Sirk, Ritwik Ghatak, Wong Kar-wai, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Pedro Almodovar, among others, we will study global and transnational flows in the adoption of the politics and aesthetics of the melodramatic mode. The seminar is conceived to be interdisciplinary and participants are encouraged to work with texts from disciplines other than film studies as well, including theatre, visual arts, music, dance, literature etc.

Last offered: Spring 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

FILMSTUD 259:Game Studies (FILMSTUD 459)

This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to ot
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This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to other (digital as well as non-digital) non-game media, such as film, television, print fiction, or non-game computer applications? Of course, to engage meaningfully with these questions at all will require us to investigate theories of mediality (including inter- and transmediality) more generally. Finally, though, we will be interested in the formal and experiential parameters that define (different types of) digital games in particular. What does it feel like to play (various) digital games? What are the relations between storytelling and the activity of gameplaying in them? What is the relation between these aspects and the underlying mechanics of digital games, as embodied in hardware and software? What is the role of the human body? Because these questions can only be approached on the basis of personal experience, students will be expected to spend some time playing digital games and reflecting critically on their gameplay.

Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.

The Hollywood director Howard Hawks was taken up by European film critics in the 1950s as an early case study for auteurism, in which Hollywood directors were regarded as a film's primary author. While Hawks' work ranges across decades (1920s-70s), studios, and genres (comedy, western, war, musical, epic, adventure), his work is recognizable both stylistically and narratively. His collaborations with writers and performers, the impact of his minimalist style, and issues of heterosexual romance and homosocial groups will be emphasized.

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? The second quarter focuses on the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Europe's re-acquaintance with classical antiquity and its first contacts with the New World. Authors include Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Milton. N.B. This is the second of three courses in the European track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study European history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future. Students who take
HUMCORE 11 and
HUMCORE 12Q will have preferential admission to
HUMCORE 13Q (a WR2 seminar).

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This third and final quarter focuses on the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon.

Even if many of us don't fully believe in an afterlife, we remain fascinated by visions of it. This course focuses on Near-Death Experiences and the stories around them, investigating them from the many perspectives pertinent to the growing field of narrative medicine: medical, neurological, cognitive, psychological, sociological, literary, and filmic. The goal is not to understand whether the stories are veridical but what they do for us, as individuals, and as a culture, and in particular how they seek to reshape the patient-doctor relationship. Materials will span the 20th century and come into the present. Taught in English.

Last offered: Autumn 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

FRENCH 87N:The New Wave: How The French Reinvented Cinema

Focus on the French New Wave's cinematic revolution of 1959-1962. In a few years, the Nouvelle Vague delivered landmark works such as Truffaut's 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Chabrol's Les Cousins or Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, and changed forever the way we make and think about movies. Why did these films look so radically fresh? What do they say about France's youth culture in the early 60s? How is the author's theory behind them still influencing us today? Focus is on cultural history, aesthetic analysis, interpretation of narrative, sound and visual forms. Taught in English. NOTE: Class meets Tuesday/Thursday 12:00-1:20pm; film screenings Monday 6:00-8:50pm in room 540-108